Former Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser said that the GTA series games resemble the works of Charles Dickens in terms of world-building.
In an interview, he also mentioned other classics — Tolstoy, Zola — to emphasize that open-world games create a sense of a living, interesting society.
Although they are not as good as Dickens, they are similar to how he creates the world. There is a feeling that games strive to create a complete and interesting world.
This idea influenced the script of Red Dead Redemption 2.
For this, I voraciously read Victorian novels and listened to the audiobook "Middlemarch" every day on my way to and from work. I really enjoyed it.
He added:
I wanted the game to feel a little more innovative from a script point of view. We tried to fill the characters with three-dimensional life and convey the feeling of life and death in the 19th century.
Houser also named Arthur Morgan and Niko Bellic as his favorite protagonists:
They were the most ambitious, and choosing between them has always been difficult for me.
